Spyder: Add ligature rendering in editor

[elegantandrogyne]

Description of your problem

Spyder IDE doesn't render ligatures (combinations of glyphs into one single symbol) in fonts supporting them.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Install a font with support for programming ligatures - such as Fira Code https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
2. Select the font in Tools > Preferences > Editor > Font
3. In the editor, enter some character combinations leading to ligatures, such as "==", "=>", "!="

Groups of characters should be converted to ligatures - they are displayed as separate characters instead.

Versions and main components

• Spyder Version: 2.3.8 (from PyPI)
• Python Version: 3.5
• Operating system: Debian amd64, stretch/sid, Xfce4
  

  Dependencies

IPython >=1.0 : 2.4.1 (OK)
jedi >=0.8.1;<0.9.0: 0.9.0 (NOK)
matplotlib >=1.0 : 1.5.1 (OK)
pandas >=0.13.1 : 0.17.1 (OK)
pep8 >=0.6 : 1.6.2 (OK)
psutil >=0.3 : 3.4.2 (OK)
pyflakes >=0.6.0 : 1.0.0 (OK)
pygments >=1.6 : 2.1 (OK)
pylint >=0.25 : 1.5.2 (OK)
rope >=0.9.2 : 0.9.4-1 (OK)
sphinx >=0.6.6 : 1.3.5 (OK)
sympy >=0.7.3 : None (NOK)
zmq >=2.1.11 : 15.1.0 (OK)

[alchzh]

This is pretty weird... I was using spyder fine for months with ligatures and I recently reinstalled it and I don't have ligatures anymore...

Aha! it seems qt5 and PyQt5 support ligatures but not qt4 and PyQt4

[cwdjankoski]

I'm also having troubles getting it (firacode with ligatures) to work properly with
QTKit: Get Info String: QTKit 7.7.3
spyder v3.3.0 on macOS 10.12.6.
I can choose the font in the preferences but ligatures do not display.
Anyone has an idea for possible workaround or fix? happy to provide more info or help!

[liuyigh]

Any chance to get this feature?

[ccordoba12]

I don't know if this can be done in Qt (the graphical toolkit Spyder is built on top of). And this is very low priority for us, sorry.

[Akintola-Stephen]

How do I install Fira code in Spyder IDE ?